Max Payne: Official Police Dosster
by Themata
Summary: Starts from the very beginning
1. Prologue

Prologue

In the backseat of a moving car, I am cut loose from the city. It watches me pass with sharp neon eyes.

The night has glided the skyscrapers in silver.

Every brick wall is covered with graffiti. The image of a green "V" with a syringe in the middle, repeated over and over. V for Valkyr. The Drug.

The red and blue of the police car's lights flash on the white snow.

something goes clank in the night, and the sound is close enough to a gunshot to take me back to the beginning.

My last meeting with Alex before i went undercover. sitting in a crummy diner opposite me, he had grinned, a friendly bear, but i had seen it in his eyes.

We hadn't been on the side of the winners in a long time. He was playing it safe, talking shop:

"To get to the source, we need to get to Jack Lupino. For that, you need the trust of the small-timers in the Punchinello family.

Joey and Virgillo Finito. Lupino's number one man, Vinnie Gognitti.

All the wiseguys."

It must have been there. The sign of things to come. Clear in the fear of Alex's eyes, in the darkness of the coffee i was drinking, in the way my beretta dug paonfully into my side.

but we were blind to it then, closing our eyes to it. Refusing to see. Later that night, Max Payne as a DEA special agent was erased from the vast network of databases, and replaced with a new version of me:

Max Payne, the career criminal with a mile-long rap sheet.

A couple of days ago it had all come crashing down.

The bad things came, like a winter storm.

Pushed over the edge, I found myself in that cold no-mans land between right and wrong.

No road-signs. On a crash-course with the Mafia.

With nothing to lose. The NYPD was trailing me by the dotted line of empty shell casings that i left behind.

I was trying to look for the answers, but every gunshot, instead of closure, was just a hole with more questions leaking out.

A spreading labyrinth of questions, like a pool of blood spreading on the snow.

The car stops in the traffic lights.

Outside, the light paints snow red, like the whole city was in flames.

But inside, in the shadows of the car, it's all done in blues.

i know i'm lying to myself.

No amount of painkillers can keep this ache away.

no lie can hide it.

I'm not really in the backseat of this car.

I didn't start in the diner with Alex.

It started three years ago in my bedroom.

And i haven't left that room since.

The killer dead at my feet on the floor.

Michelle lying on the bed.

Bullet holes like rubies on her chest.

Our baby's cry cut short, the absense of it heavy in the air.

That gunshot, like an exclamination mark to end it all, the answer to all my questions had already rung out a long time ago, even if it's echoes gone.

That room insides me everywhere i go.

Especially now, as the city presses close to the windows of the car, it's monstrous heartbeat under the tires.

My squinted eyes in the rear-view mirror.

My hands numb and held awkwardly behind my back.

Everything that came after that room is a hopless mess, a chaotic swirl, rising nausea that tastes like rust in my mouth.

To make any kind of sense of it, I need to go back three years. Back to the night the pain started...


	2. Part 1

Part 1: The American Dream

I was still in the force back then, NYPD, Manhattan, Midtown, North Precinct, Hell's Kitchen.

"So, when are you coming to work for me, Detective Payne?"

"You'd make me work undercover in some hellhole.

Sorry Alex, Michelle and the baby come first."

"See! My Last smoke. It's bad for the baby."

"That's you, Max. A regular boy scout."

"See you Alex."

"Still on for poker Thursday night, Right?"

"Like taking candy from a baby."

Leaves the office and goes home

Life is good.

The sound settling on a sweet summer's day. The smell of freshly mowered lawns, the sounds of children playing-

A house across the river, on the Jersey side. A beautiful wife and a baby girl.

The American Dream come true.

"Honey I'm home."

But dreams have a nasty habit of turning bad when you're not looking.

The sun went down with practiced bravado. Twilight crawled across the sky, ladens with foreboding.

checks the house

Checks first closet, finds nothing

Checks second closet, finds a shotgun with 5 bullets

Something ugly had been tattooed on the wall, a map of things to come.

It was a poison syringe, a magic tag full of diabolical meanings.

Phone rings

"Listen! Someone's broken into my house. Call 911."

"Is this the Payne residence?"

"Yes, someone's broken into my house, they're still here, you have to --"

"Good. I am afraid i cannot help you."

"Who is this?"

Klink

"Hello?"

Goes up the stairwell, to hear cries from his wife and daughter

Hears the cries from the bathroom, but door is locked

Goes into his daughter's room, and encounters some killer junkies

Shoots them with the shotgun

Rushes to his wife, Michelle, who was shot earlier

Screams NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

That was three years ago. Everything ripped apart in a New York Minute.

The killer junkies had been high on a previously unknown designer drug. Valkyr, V.

After the funeral, i told Alex that i would be transferring to the DEA.

It took us 3 long years to get a break on the valkyr case.

The, finally two months ago, a dime dropper tipped us off that Jack Lupino, a mob-boss in the Punchinello crime family, was trafficking.

I went undercover, infiltrated the worst Mafia family in New York.


	3. Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Roscoe Street Station

I came in from the cold and dark. Outside, the city was a cruel monster.

I'd been slowly working my way from small-time to get to the big fish.

Trying to get to the source of the drug.

Alex and B.B. were my only contacts in the DEA.

The only ones in this decrepit city who knew i was down here.

"B.B. here... something urgent has come up with Jack Lupino. You need to meet with Alex immediately...

at the Roscoe Street Station."

I hadn't had a face to face with Alex since i gone undercover

Outside the mercury was falling fast. It was colder than the Devil's heart, raining ice pitchforks as if the heavens were ready to fall.

Everyone was running for shelter like there was no tomorrow.

It didn't get any better when i got to the subway.

The feeling hit me like a point-blank shot straight in the face --

something was not right about this.


	4. Chapter 2

Chapter 2: One Way or The Other

The rusty door lead to an abandoned part of the station closed since the early 40's.

Something big was going down at Roscoe Street.

Maybe that's why Alex wanted to meet me here.

Maybe not--

Says to self "either way i was going to find out"

Goes along the corridor and kills all the junkies i encounter


	5. Chapter 2, subchapter 1

Chapter 2: Live From the Crime Scene

A/N another one of those sub-chapters

Goes along the corridors, finds locked door that requires a detonator

Overhears that there's an alternate route to leave the station from the junkie killers

Crashes their party and starts killing everyone i see

Gets shot at while killing them finds painkillers and takes them

Hears the phone and answers it

We come to you live from the crime scene.

"Who is this?"

"Right back at you."

"This is Deputy Chief Jim Bravura from the NYPD. You are to cease your criminal activities and surrender immediately."

"Sure thing, Jim. Me and the boys have been talking and everyone's real sorry. They'll never do it again."

"Who the HELL is this"?

Being placed at the scene of a bank robbery wouldn't have tipped the odds in my favour.

Uses switch to open the different vaults

Finds documents in one of the vaults

The bank robbers had been after Aesir Corporation bends

The Aesir success story had recently been on every channel and on the cover of every magazine.

Finds detonator, leaves fault

Goes back stairwell that i used to get to the vaults

Encounters more junkies, kill them all

Use detonator


	6. Chapter 2, subchapter 2

Chapter 2: Stepping On toes

Detonator destroys door

Alex rushes to scene, sees a figure, finds checks to see that it's me

We start talking about how this is Lupino's gig

Alex gets shot, by mysterious figure

He runs from the scene

Alex had kept me relatively sane for the past 3 years.

Now i didn't know how i felt.

Kill the incoming junkies

Goes through the corridors, kill more junkies

Activate switch for alternate exit, take some pain killers with me

Leave the station

Somehow he had stumbled upon something big--

and ended up stepping on Jack Lupino's toes.

A/N we find out who the mysterious figure is later on.


End file.
